Kafka

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT KAFKA - PAGE 3

By Reviewed by Robert Craft, a conductor and critic whose most recent book is the revised edition of "Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship" | December 31, 1995

Testaments Betrayed By Milan Kundera Translated by Linda Asher HarperCollins, 280 pages, $24 Milan Kundera begins his indictment of the betrayal of the writer by the well-meaning but misguided disciple or custodian, and of the composer by the performer, with an examination of the relations between Kafka and Max Brod. Since it is no longer news that Kafka did not ask Brod to destroy all of his work after his death--Kafka on his deathbed was correcting the galley proofs of "A Hunger Artist" for publication--an account of their friendship, fanatic veneration on Brod's side, need not be retold here.

Imagine, for a moment, a theater director who insists that the people working for him don't act. "I don't believe in acting, in suspending disbelief," says Greg Allen, artistic and managing director of the Neo-Futurists. "I don't want the audience to think about watching characters, or actors playing roles. I want people to realize these are real living human beings in front of other real living human beings." And that's pretty much how he directs the Neo-Futurists in their long-running late-night show, "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" and in the group's most recent success, "K."

Three years ago Steven Soderbergh was Hollywood's golden boy. He had just released his first film, a low-budget sleeper called "sex, lies, and videotape," which seduced and, simultaneously, chastised the voyeur in all of us. The film, which cost only $1 million to produce, grossed more than $100 million worldwide. Its title quickly became a part of the vernacular. And every studio in town was rapping at Soderbergh's door. The assumption was that the wunderkind would be the next Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese or maybe even the American Ingmar Bergman, a chronicler of '90s sexual mores.

KA: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India By Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks Knopf, 446 pages, $27.50 `Ka" is another mirrored panel in a great hall of myth and history that is being built by the Italian publisher, editor, writer and polymath Roberto Calasso. "Ka" is the third of the panels to appear in English, following Calasso's survey of Greek and Roman myth in "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" (published in Italian in 1988 and translated in 1993)

If a friend says that they'd rather stay home and read a good book than go to a restaurant, you might shrug. But when the chef of a restaurant makes that decision, and the chef is the world-famous Charlie Trotter, people are bound to pay attention. Trotter startled colleagues and customers alike last week when he said in a published report that he was planning to walk away from his stove and could not predict when or if he would return, or even if the restaurant would remain open.